Ever since I started writing books for children, I have considered it important
to deal with the difficult subject of war and peace in a way that children can understand.
It seems to me that it is not enough to tell children that war is terrible and that peace
is much nicer. Although even that is a step forward, of course, considering there was once
a youth literature that glorified the military and combat action. But most children in our
latitudes know that war is something terrible and peace is much nicer. But is peace
possible? Or is war an unavoidable destiny that keeps befalling humankind? Doesn’t
our history class, as well as the evening news, teach us that war has always existed
everywhere in the world and is still with us? A culture of peace, understanding of others,
peaceful resolution of conflicts – all of that is well and good: but what if the
others do not want to go along?

I cannot imagine how we can banish war from the life
of humankind, if we do not search for the causes of war. Only when the cause of a disease
is discovered, can a focused and effective method be found to fight it.

It is true that I just skipped all my history classes
at university, but at home I have continued my studies of history for myself to this day
because, as a writer, the question of what determines people’s actions and thoughts
is naturally always on my mind. But of course I cannot claim to have found the
philosopher’s stone or that in my stories I could absolutely explain the causes of
war. And I also cannot present a complete recipe for the avoidance of future wars. But I
want the stories to do more than just give people "food for thought." Writers
are always trying to give people something to think about, but at some point, someone is
going to have to start thinking. The stories I have collected here are intended to suggest
a direction in which a person can continue to think; they are intended to convey a feeling
for where and how to search for the causes of war.

Maybe the
intentions of the book can best be summed up like this: I try to show
how our actions can be interconnected in such a way, that the ones who do
not try their best to further their own interests must perish. But that on
the other hand by each of us trying to further our own interests we may in
fact unintentionally increase the loss or make worse the damage for all of
us. And that we cannot escape this dilemma unless we communicate with each
other and coordinate our actions. This moral is simple enough, but the hard
thing is to really see through the complex ways in which the actions of
individuals, groups, nations, states on this planet are interconnected.

I am trying to teach children to begin
to recognize that sort of social mechanism, and I think that this is a
novel approach in children's literature.